The small mercy of an apartment I can’t afford
Where I can be alone & where the cock
Down the street still crows all afternoon & into the evening
I haven’t been able to look at
I haven’t been able to face
The news for going on three months
I’ve been stuck in my corner fighting my part of the war
And because I could not desert my post
And all of the fights would not cohere
But put that in the future tense
Nothing will cohere or gel until I find out how to speak again
Until I find out whether I can.
& something very large in me does not
It wants the true feeling
I couldn’t avoid the word
Even try but for some reason something within me is angry
Also at the ugliness of that word
There is something puny about it so out of proprtion
An old one for me if you want to know
& who is We & who am I to say We you will say
I don’t want to go past it
The word sad is like a tinker toy that is stuck in my gullet which does not prevent me from walking or speaking but merely embitters my soul for all time
I worry about the other side of the camera
The other side of seeing being
It doesn’t stop them at all
An act of naked rapacity committed before the eye of God in the Fourth Century
Is recorded in the minute horror of its consequences
Generation after generation
In the lunges & lapses something Satanic
Still sucking sucking sucking at the marrow of all soul
& venereal with disgusting lust to leave nothing left alive on Earth
So as we now have every particular
Every cell of the psychotic loathing that has been rotting this country from the root since Day One
Since there is more & more on film & as black blood soaks the sore wad
Of cotton stuffed high into me & my head & world conjeal in TV snow
That is a blue grey mist of headachey dots & incidentally no longer exists
I am swollen & angry with my unsayable burden
& I do not know what I’m saying
I’m saying it’s hard to live & everyone I know is tired & scared
Of rationalizing tales that’re thin, only good enough to get one through half
Maybe a quarter of a day in this particular world
It’s chemicals that make us go & stop, usually the kind you can buy
& obligations, in other words money, which masquerade as form & choice
& the dread my endocrine machinery manufactures for me daily
& the words like a superfluity
Sprinkled over obscene reality
Bludgeoning every being I see
& intelligence itself too looks mighty flimsy
& also vain & self-deluding, like cardboard in rain
Or like the wrong fashions or an off tweet or like your resolve
Like your softening resolve
Like exhaustion as a way of life
I’d like to talk strategy
But you have too many feelings
& everybody has too many feelings
& when you’re done having your feelings it’s time for me to have mine
They’re my only possessions
They are my invisible splendor
& also today I’m too tired
& my terribly humble dreadfully solitary honesty
I have missed the roominess of telling this
& I have missed that in poetry one must be wrong
I have missed the only liberty I’ve ever known
Which is, In poetry one need never commit the sly indignity
To turn myself over to all that is unimpressive in sadness
I’m here to deflower all eloquence
To tear at the hair of my eloquence like a mourner
To shred my raiment & smear myself in ash
But I really loathe these figures of speech
& I really loathe their preening sincerities
For the angrier I get at the possibility language might not fail
To carry to you something of the feeling I cannot express
The prettier the lithe little rhythms want to go
To turn myself over to the feeling that says
There is who we wish we were & there is the hideous fact of what we are
& the exhausting exhausting exhausting knowledge
& the feeling of being very alone with this responsibility
& of knowing that the hordes & hordes of us who are sad at this world
Feel alone with this responsibility
Of remaking it all stone by stone by yourself, of having to sort it out all fucking ready
Because this is not who you thought we were
It is not who I wanted to be
And who is going to share your bed tonight
And who will you break bread with
And who will you give the secrets of your day to
And to whom will you tell the little things of your day
Do your mother and your father know you at all
Would you like to be a mother or a father ever
Would you like to be another
& has love recently surprised, enlarged your world, maddened your heart
& foamed the blood of your heart til you thought something good & proud might yet
& take responsibility for these murders
It’s a misery but not half what the fear is
Metallic in the mouth & souring the guts
That your hide means any second any second
They’ll do it to you, camera
I gassed the Jews said Sarah Kane
& one, not that you asked, of mine
The guilt of time having carried me away from the horror
& vouchsafed to me also the demoralizing protection
Offered by true & gleeful oblivion
One of the horrors of surviving
One of the ways they end life & leave us nothing but survival
Is the enforced passivity of having watched, having seen, with your blood boiling
No matter what you also do
Just having watched, having seen
Does something weird in the mind that makes you forget your own flayings
Yes it enrages yes it so to speak radicalizes
& that is the part I’m alone with now
What if I had a nightmare that I was the inventor
Of the American religion whose God demands constant food
Whose abcess mouth must be stuffed with living black bodies at all times lest his
Diseased tool his carbuncular engine ever end its bland bland bland dominion
I’m just a dumb asymmetrical bitch standing here on this corner getting catcalled
& cretinizing before your very eyes
Growing more & more dumbfounded
At all that can happen while I watch
& all that will happen whether I watch or not
& how speech true speech sometimes seems the highest magic
No longer even notice what they’re doing to me
For to watch is to become an accessory
To murder & my empty arm is an accessory to the blue arm of the killer
& then come shame & horror
Torn apart by fruitless empathy
Foundering in all your pits, paralyzed
Filled with rage & disgust you’re too disorganized
To direct at any thing or anyone but yourself
I’d like to recover my voice.
I miss the sound of yours.
My only possession that goes out of my body not as waste.
I wonder what it would feel like.
I’d like to do a language purge & see
If God grant me the peace enough to see it thru
When it’s over if it ever ends it there’s anything left
Or the truly rare grace of just force
Goddamn. Goddamn it to Hell. Rest in Power, Sandra Bland.
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